WordPress 4.9 What’s New

WordPress 4.9 has been released recently with amazing new features and workflow.

Let’s see some of the most exciting and useful options added to WordPress with this new release so you feel right at home after updating to WordPress 4.9.

List of WordPress 4.9 new feature:

Theme Browsing and Switching Improvements

Save Draft and Schedule Settings

Syntax Highlighting and Code Error Checking

Automated Warnings

New Gallery Widget

New Add Media Button in Text Widget

Adding Shortcodes in Text Widget

If you have been greeted with the message An updated version of WordPress is available then it’s time to click the Update Now button but keep in mind WordPress 4.9 is a major release which means it will not update automatically even if you have enabled automatic updates.

It is highly recommended to take a full backup of your WordPress site before updating to WordPress 4.9

Woopoo's Caution

Theme Browsing and Switching Improvements

The Customizer has been greatly improved in WordPress 4.9. You can view your already installed themes or change, preview and install new themes directly from the Customizer.

From within the Customizer, click the Change button in front of your Active theme.

In the Themes section, either see your Installed themes or browse WordPress.org themes.

Live Preview button under Installed themes will let you preview your themes even before deploying them.

Save Draft and Schedule Settings

Theme Customizer now has options to either Publish, Save Draft and Schedule the settings for any of the menu items.

Click the Gear icon and select any of the desired Actions:

Publish

Clicking the Publish will apply the settings right away.

Save Draft

Save draft will let you save the changes to be used later. A preview link has also been generated to share with people who can’t access the Customizer.

It is a nice feature to get feedback without affecting anything on your live site.

Schedule

The schedule will let any theme changes to be published automatically on the scheduled date and time. For example, you can set your homepage to automatically replaced with a Black Friday Sale static page on every Friday.

Syntax Highlighting and Code Error Checking

Code error checking is another great feature added to the code editor. Not only this, hovering over the cross or warning icons will give you hints to correct your code.

If you prefer to stick to old style plain-text code editing, you can disable syntax highlighting from User Profile settings.

Automated Warnings

Directly accessing critical files within WordPress will show you automated warnings to let you think one more time before making any changes to those files directly.

New Gallery Widget

A brand new gallery widget has been introduced in WordPress 4.9. Yes! you can now place your beautiful pictures in the sidebar using a gallery widget. Adding an image gallery in the sidebar is a piece of cake now.

New Add Media Button in Text Widget

WordPress 4.8 brought us a featured-rich text widget. The same text widget has been even enhanced by introducing the Add Media button which lets you add images, videos, and other media in the text widget and place them in the sidebar.

Adding Shortcodes in Text Widget

WordPress 4.9 brings another great feature to add shortcodes in the text widget. Prior to this release, it was only possible to add this functionality by editing WordPress files. Enabling shortcodes in text widget was actually a long-awaited feature which has been answered finally.

Let’s quickly summarize some other features which have been incorporated in WordPress 4.9: